Mrs. Roundell's Practical cookery book

remove the saucepan from the fire, and as you pour it into the tureen stir into it a coffeecupful of the soup with which the strained yolk of an egg has been mixed. Be careful to clear all white from the yolk, or it will set in flaky pieces and spoil the look of the soup. Should this by any accident occur, the whole should be passed through the strainer before serving. Vegetable Soup. — ( Family Recipe.) — Fry a little onion (about four ounces) in bacon fat. Cut two carrots, two leeks, and two young turnips into good-sized pieces. Boil the vegetables in a pint and a half of stock. Then add three tablespoonfuls of rice previously well boiled. Boil all together for twenty minutes. Cold Soup, for very hot weather. — Make a good clear soup, and add three ounces of Tapioca. Let it stand in a cold place till wanted, and serve when just liquid. Dried Turtle Soup.— Buy Sun-Dried Turtle at a first-rate shop, so that you may be sure not to get conger eel. Half a pound of dried turtle must be allowed for a quart of soup ; and four days must be allowed for making it. Soak the pieces of dried turtle in cold water for three days and three nights, changing the water night and morning. After this soaking the pieces of turtle will be found three times the size that they were when dry. Make an uncoloured stock with knuckle of veal and broken veal bones, and use plenty of vegetables and herbs. Basil is the herb peculiarly suited to turtle soup, and two or three sprigs of it should be used, with a sprig of thyme and of marjoram, and two bay leaves. Add six peppercorns, but no salt, for as the turtle takes so long to cook it would become too salt. Simmer the pieces of turtle in the stock for twelve hours. Strain off the vegetables, remove all fat, cut the pieces of turtle into convenient sizes, and put them back into the heated soup. Add a dessertspoonful of fine arrowroot, a glass of Marsala, and a good squeeze of lemon ; boil for a few minutes, and serve. Quarters of lemon should be handed. Dried-turtle Soup should not be much thickened, and should be greenish in colour. Thickened Soups.— In Thickened Soups French people have a method which we might follow with advantage. This is to add bread freely to the soup. The bread is not cut haphazard, but in small thin slanting or diagonal slices, and, for some reason as yet unexplained, slanting slices mix themselves with the soup in a way that square slices never will. Another excellent plan at a home dinner is to cut off the bottom crust of a tinned loaf so that there is as much crumb as crust. Divide these into pieces the size of a gentleman’s visiting-card. Soak them till perfectly soft in some of the soup, then crisp them in the oven, lay one in each soup-plate, and pour the hot soup over it. The usual fault of thickened soups is that they are too thick, sometimes more like gruel than soup. The cook can so easily avoid this error that it seems strange that she should commit it at all. But the reason is that she has never been told, and has never observed, that the full effect of the thickening can only be judged when the soup comes to the boil.